"Haiku, the open source re-creation of BeOS, threatens to become 'The Duke Nukem of operating systems', joked long-time contributor Ryan Leavengood. Actually, after eleven years of development, Haiku still falls four years short of Duke Nukem Forever's long delay, but few other projects have been so long in development. However, with the recent release of Alpha 4.1, Haiku is at last nearing general release." 2013 is going to be very exciting for Haiku.

Official release only one year after the first alpha for a relatively small community project? I don't know what the "general consensus" was back then, but I do know that I sure as hell never expected that. I had far more reasonable and down-to-earth expectations at the time, no bizarre pipe-dreams. Maybe 2-3 years if we were lucky.. and amusingly, that really doesn't seem to have been too far off. So, no surprise here, and as someone who has waited since probably around 1996 for Duke Nukem Forever, only to be eternally disappointed by the end result to the point of not even considering it a worthy successor to Duke Nukem 3D, I completely fail to see how the comparisons with Haiku make any sense whatsoever.

That said, I was quite amazed at the stability and functionality of the OS even in its early alpha days... but that didn't cloud my expectations. The speed that the guys have been getting stuff done has also been quite impressive over the last few years. They're getting there.